While I’m in a picture sort of modes, here’s a theme that’s been running through my life this week.  First, notice the above razor?  It’s put out by Gillette and it’s the best razor I’ve used so far.  Notice what is absent on it?  That’s right, the multi-blade, comfort protection, gizmo attached glory that you normally see on razors these days.  It’s the subject of many jokes, but truthfully I’ve not found a better razor.  I think what did it for me was the lack of a comfort strip.  It just cuts my stubble and does it exceptionally well.  Simplicity is the key.  The funny thing is that I can’t even find a picture of this stupid razor anywhere on gillette’s site.  It’s all about the Mach 3 and turbo 4 and the gosh-gee-whiz-I’ve-got-alot-of-blades 5. 

I wonder if an issue we have as an american culture is a problem with simplicity; that bigger has to be better simply because it’s bigger right?  The Ipod, for example, falls prey to this lure with the Shuffle (512MB and 1GB), the Nano (1, 2 and 4 GB models), the U2 Ipod, the Ipod Mini, and the Original Ipod in it’s variety of sizes.  Yet people gravitate to it as a device because it’s essentially simple.  At it’s core, it’s a bastion of simplicity.  It has only a few buttons (play, pause, next track) and can hold a tremendous amount of stuff. 

Well, my world intersected with apple in a big way this week.  A long story, indeed, but I had to replace a woefully underpowered Powervault 220s (a machine, by the way, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy).  I had two options: a dell AX100 and an XServe RAID.  Both options are in the ‘entry level’ SAN catagory having primairly SATA storage and similar performance numbers (the Xserve raid edges out the AX100 by a fair margin though).  At the end of the day, I got a demo XServe and ended up putting it through it’s paces and it was dramatically easy to setup, run and get going.  The best, in the simplicity philosophy that apple seems to hold to all of it’s products the Xserve did it’s job extremely well and was extremely easy to setup and it will be arriving at my doorstep relatively shortly.  At this point, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get a decent SAN setup relatively cheaply and without compromising the ability to make things work and offer a considerable amount of capacity.